Looking Outward, Looking In

Posted on Sat Feb 15th, 2014 @ 7:26pm by Ensign Gregory Mason & Captain Tim Williams

Episode: Orphans
Location: USS Highlander, Astrometrics Lab
Timeline: Day 02, 1402 Hours

ON: [[USS Highlander, Astrometrics Lab, Day 02, 1402 Hours]]

Gregory let out a deep sigh. It had been ages since the young science officer last looked up toward the familiar night sky of his own planet. From where he lay, Gregory could make out many of the constellations he'd memorized as a child: the stallion, the hunter, the ox, the warrior, and so on. Each of the images had a story and he knew them all by heart. His courses at Starfleet Academy had taught him all about the stars that made up those constellations, where they came from, and how they impacted the space around them. One thing none of what he'd learned there ever really seemed able to capture, however, was what he was able to see right now. The only way to experience that was to lay back and look up toward the night sky for oneself.

Things had come a long way since graduation and Gregory was still trying very much to catch up with it all. Chief Science Officer, he often thought to himself, What am I even supposed to do with that? There were personnel files to review, resource manifests to inventory, and facilities to oversee. The idea that someone like himself could even hope to manage all of that coming straight out of the Academy had seemed rather ridiculous when they'd first told him about the assignment. After three days of trying to familiarize himself with all of his new responsibilities, Gregory still wasn't sure they'd chosen the right man for this job. All he knew was that lying here, looking up at the stars, was the only way he'd really been able to find any peace so far.

Tim had spent the last twenty minutes traversing the ship looking for his new science officer. He hadn't even been made aware that the man was onboard until he made a casual comment to Gaius about when the man was going to arrive, and had been told that he'd already been aboard for some time. So the captain had decided to go and casually find the man to speak with him - a task which had proved harder than he thought it would. He could of course have asked the computer to locate Ensign Mason for him, but as he had started out to have a casual talk, he was determined not to fall back on the computer to track the man down.

After looking in Mason's quarters and most of the ship's science labs, he had almost decided to give up his task to try again later, when he passed the door to astrometrics close enough for its sensors to think he was entering... and they stayed stubbornly closed. Backtracking to bring himself back to the double doors, he stood right in front of them, confirming that the doors had been sealed. Astrometics wasn't a restricted area, so there would be no reason for the room to require controlled access, so that meant that somebody had purposely locked it. Reaching over to the panel next to the door, he keyed in his override code, and watched as the doors slid effortlessly open.

The sound of the laboratory door managed to draw Gregory's attention. Even though it was only about mid-afternoon according to the ship's chronometer, which had been synced to the natural cycles of Cestus III for the duration of their stay, there shouldn't have been anyone else in the room. Personnel were still in the process of arriving and Gregory had taken the added precaution of sealing the doors so as to avoid interruption. So either he was hearing things or...

"I didn't realise it was stargazing hour," Tim said, smiling and fighting back a chuckle as he saw the man he had been looking for lying on the floor in front of the lab's large, curved viewscreen. As he stepped deeper into the room, the doors shut behind him, shutting out the new source of light and plunging the room back into darkness again.

Gregory sat bolt upright. Not only had someone wandered upon him making private use of the Highlander's astrometrics lab, but the person in question was none other than Captain Williams, himself. "Computer, lights," Gregory rasped.

"Ensign Mason, I presume?" Tim said, still unable to remove the look of amusement from his face, especially considering the young man's apparent shock at being interrupted. The old phrase 'a rabbit caught in headlights' came to mind.

Gregory wasn't exactly sure what to make of the whole situation. He struggled to process what might be an appropriate response, even as the effects of being blinded by the sudden increase in lighting were beginning to wear off, but a certain sense of disorientation remained. This was not exactly the way he'd imagined meeting his Commanding Officer. "Yes...sir," Gregory stammered, pushing himself somewhat awkwardly to his feet, "Ensign Gregory Mason, Chief Science Officer."

"Do you prefer Greg or Gregory?" Tim asked, switching straight to his more informal preference as he strolled over to perch himself on the edge of one of the central consoles.

"Gregory is fine...sir," Gregory replied, "or Greg, whichever you prefer."

"Tim," the captain said, pointing to himself and inviting the younger man to use his own first name. Turning to consider the image that was still displayed on the viewer, he nodded his head in their direction. "Stars of home, Greg?"

Although Gregory could have been reasonably certain the captain had never been to North Star Colony before, it shouldn't have surprised him that Williams still had some idea of what they were looking at. The young science officer's attention wandered slightly toward the starry sky still visible on the main view screen before returning to the man standing before him. "Yeah," he affirmed, "roughly the view you'd get not too far from where I grew up."

"What can you tell me about them?" Tim hoped he could try and get the man's sentences flowing more freely - without such a preoccupation with the fact that he was talking to someone who just happened to be his captain - by talking about something that was clearly more familiar to him, and a subject Tim assumed he would enjoy talking about.

Gregory let out a quick breath he didn't even realize he'd been holding up to that point. "Well," he began, turning toward the viewscreen, "this grouping over here...that's the hunter. You can see the curve of the bow along this line and then his arm goes back like this..." As Gregory spoke, he traced the direction with his hands, trying to give some impression of what they were looking at. It probably would have been simpler to just pull up some sort of image overlay, but that wasn't the way he'd learned how to find these constellations.

"What about this one here?" Tim asked, pointing to a set of dots that looks as though they could be joined up to form some sort of animal, like a horse or a dog.

The young science officer turned toward the direction Williams was pointing and smiled when he saw that guess as to which constellation Williams was referring to turned out to be correct. "That'd be the stallion," Gregory explained, tracing its shape with his finger, "You've got the head here which flows down into the neck and torso. Then you've got each of the legs here...one, two, three, four. It kind of makes sense, I suppose, when you consider North Star Colony was essentially lifted right out of the American west. The stallion would have been a pretty familiar image...unlike most of these stars, I suppose..."

Tim nodded as the ensign explained his home constellations, before getting a familiar and hard-to-resist urge to show off what improvements he had made to this room and its facilities over the years. "Mind if we take a closer look?" he said, smiling as the idea came to him. Dropping off from the console he had perched himself on, he turned to face it and typed in some commands. In a fizzle of holographic photons, the walls, screen, and everything minus the floor, central consoles and the rooms two occupants vanished, instead replaced by a three dimensional representation of the constellations the pair had been studying, with the perspective from North Star Colony being centred in the middle of the three consoles left obscured by the holographic field.

There was a moment of slight disorientation as Gregory adjusted to his "new" surroundings. The holographic projection made it seem as if the entire room had dissolved away. Instead of being limited to the laboratory's primary viewscreen, the starry night sky of North Star Colony now completely surrounded both men as they stood observing it. Gregory had known about the room's holo-imaging systems, of course, but had opted not to use them. They required a great deal of additional power than the primary imaging systems which would have probably drawn too much attention to his being there in the first place. Considering the captain had already found him lying in the middle of the astrometrics lab, however, it all seemed rather moot at this point.

Gregory turned slightly as his gaze slowly made its way around the room. If the primary viewscreen had been akin to laying out beneath the stars, the holo-imaging system was more like floating among them. He could still pick out the familiar images of each constellation he'd been looking at before. At the same time, however, what they were looking at now seemed to encompass a great deal more than that. Gregory's sweep of the room paused when his attention came to rest on a familiar golden yellow star. Placing one hand on either side of the image, he closed his fists as if grabbing on to a large sheet and proceeded to draw them apart, causing the image of the star itself to grow larger before them.

"Looks a lot different up-close and personal, doesn't it?" Tim asked, stepping over next to the ensign as they both considered the large ball of fire that now separated them from the door to the lab. Tim had seen stars up close on a viewscreen many times, but seeing it now, holographically, was the only time that he ever felt as if he was seeing it properly. Even close shuttle flybys rarely gave one a proper perspective of the impressive sight that was a system's sun.

"Out of all these stars, we never really pay much attention to this one," Gregory mused mostly to himself, "I mean, how often do we really think about the sun shining over our heads until it isn't there anymore?" The one star that arguably meant more to North Star Colony than any other in the night sky and Gregory was only just now really starting to look at it more closely. He'd known the stories of every other constellation, every other star that he'd seen as a child except for this one. The realization that he had been taking his homeworld's sun for granted was a strange one for Gregory. Remembering that his was not alone, however, Gregory quickly turned his attention away from his musings and back to the situation at hand.

"You looking forward to getting out there?" the captain asked, looking side-long at the man as he changed the subject ever so slightly. He had remembered reading about the younger man's background when he was selecting him as his science officer, and remembered that before the Academy, he hadn't ever left the colony where he was born.

"This is the furthest I've ever been away from home, actually," Gregory replied, "though I'm sure pretty much everyone else on this ship could probably say the same thing."

"Most of them," Tim agreed. He himself had actually had the opportunity to travel through the Bajoran Wormhole and spend time in the Gamma Quadrant - though even with that, Cestus was hardly a stone's throw away from Earth. "We're pretty much near the outer edges of the Federation's influence out here. But if you don't keep on going further out, you'll soon run out of things to discover."

Gregory shrugged his shoulders. What his Commanding Officer was saying wasn't exactly wrong, per se. A whole lot of people joined Starfleet precisely because it gave them the opportunity to push boundaries, go farther, and venture out into the unknown. That was part of the reason Gregory had chosen to join...that it helped him move past the edges of everything he'd known growing up. At the same time, however, there was something to be said for the discoveries that remained hidden within what most people considered to be "known". Mapping new star systems never did anyone good unless you learned their stories and the stories of those who inhabited them (if there were any). It could very well have been that the Federation had just as much to learn from getting to know the Romulans or the Cardassians better as it did exploring unknown space beyond the Galactic South. Then again, maybe he was just over-thinking it.

"Maybe you're right, sir," Gregory said after a moment, "That is why we're out here after all, isn't it?"

"That's what they tell me," Tim said, as he turned and deactivated the holographic imaging system, returning them to the astrometrics lab and its large viewscreen. He turned back and then smiled - not mischieviously this time, but more genuinely as he said, "welcome aboard." Deciding he had intruded on the man for long enough, and satisfied in the choice of science officer that he had made, he turned to leave.

OFF